The depressing thing is that this isn’t that far off from how OpenAI and Anthropic think.

Pretty sure The Onion accelerated the web publication of this deliciously vicious skewering of Sam Altman after last weekend’s making nice with the Pentagon.

Something feels off here. An AI CEO who claims they genuinely didn’t anticipate copyright and deepfake concerns is either dumb or playing dumb. I can’t help but suspect the latter, which is arguably worse, since it suggests an effort to shift the discourse before complaints come in.

Ugh, this article makes it sound even worse.

What a depressing story.

This is a good book, with a powerful thesis and a great epilogue that ties things together. It isn’t perfect, but I think most of my quibbles are related to the subject matter and the genre. It’s hard to write a book about a contemporary subject of such importance, and I think it’s tricky to write a book that combines history with more of a critical take on the AI ecosystem.

Look, it shouldn’t take this story for people to realize that OpenAI exploits others’ contributions to make its products, but if it does the trick, I’ll take it. (And this is admittedly creepier than its base-level exploitation.)

Last paragraph here is an important one: I’ve seen a lot of headlines about OpenAI calling for regulation, but it’s noteworthy that it’s hypothetical future regulation.